Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 10

CAPTAIN KIRK, UNPERSON

I'll give this to Paramount Pictures: they're consistent. Going back as long as I can remember, Paramount has taken a snobbish, contemptuous attitude to fans of franchises the studio itself doesn't care for. Horror afficianados discovered this decades ago, when DVD releases of classic or cult-classic movies and television shows were either conducted on the cheap (with poor image quality, cropped format, no special features and wobbly sound), or simply never took place. The lucrative FRIDAY THE 13TH slasher series, which netted Paramount countless millions over the last 40 years, got especially shabby treatment. But recently an event transpired which was so jarring that even I, who expected nothing from P-mount to begin with, found myself appalled and dismayed.

They done deleted Captain Kirk.

Paramount recently released an advertisement for "Star Trek Day" which featured images of various cast members of various TREK shows which have come along since the inception of "TOS" (the original series) in the mid-1960s. Nowhere to be found among this imagery is the face of the most important character in the show's history, James Tiberius Kirk, originally portrayed by William Shatner in live action series, animated series, and numerous feature films stretching over decades before yielding (unwillingly) to Chris Pine, who was handed the role for Jar Jar Abrams regrettable franchise reboot. Shatner has been an outspoken critic of his erasure from the franchise, and equally outspoken about the fact this erasure has been going on for many years. But contrary to what his detractors may think, these complaints are not merely those of an actor whose signature role has been appropriated from him while he is still alive and in harness: they speak to a larger issue Shatner has -- which I share -- about why this erasure is actually taking place.

Audiences were first introduced to Captain James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, a United Federation of Planets starship whose "five year mission (was) to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, and new civilizations...to boldly go where no man has gone before" in 1966. Kirk was inspired to a great degree by "Horatio Hornblower," a seafaring adventurer who appeared as the hero of a long series of adventure novels written by C.S. Forester, which were published between 1937 and 1967. Kirk, however, was a more simplified and perhaps idealized character than the troubled, complex Hornblower. Shatner's Kirk was courageous to a fault, superb in a crisis, bound almost to the point of torment by a sense of duty to his ship and his crew, and isolated by command. While he relied heavily on two subordinates (Spock and Dr. McCoy) for advice and moral support, all roads of ultimate responsibility lead to and ended with him. He wanted to do everything himself, could be ill-tempered and petty, and was clearly more comfortable with giving orders than with taking them from his own superiors. Although he detested killing and would go to enormous lengths to spare the lives of his enemies -- including, in the feature films, the life of the man who murdered his son -- he had a physical approach to problem-solving and was not the least bit shy about socking a perceived threat on the jaw. Unthreatening but persistent obstacles got the same treatment, as witnessed by this exchange in "Errand of Mercy:"

KIRK: ...where are those phasers?
AYELBORNE: I cannot tell you.
KIRK: You've told us a great deal about how you hate violence. Unless you tell me where those phasers are, you're going to have more violence than you know what to do with.
AYELBORNE: You mean you would actually use force?
KIRK: It's entirely up to you.

But it is Kirk's love of the ladies which was one of his most distinguishing characteristics. In the original series, he is relentless in his pursuit of women, so relentless that in the episode "Bread and Circuses" he beds a slave girl whose body is offered to him as a sort of last meal before his scheduled execution. (Most men in his position would be a little too preoccupied for casual sex, but not Kirk.) Nor is he above using them as means to achieve ends. In "By Any Other Name" and "Wink of an Eye" he romances women for the express purpose of producing jealous reactions in his enemies. And in "The Conscience of the King," he chastely seduces a 19 year old girl (he himself is about 33 at the time), using her to determine the identity of her father, whom he suspects is a war criminal. While Kirk is demonstratably capable of deeply romantic love, his propensity for putting ship and career over relationships (as well as, we can safely presume, some difficulty with the concept of monogamy) condemn him to never-ending isolation: every romantic partner from his past, and we meet quite a few, is very much -ex. Kirk's deepest love (he admits this more than once) is not for any woman: it is for his mistress, the starship Enterprise.

In short, Kirk is a paradigm of masculinity in its traditional and most understood form: he's brave, disciplined, proud, duty-bound, leads from the front, never shies from a fistfight, is a cocksman of the first water, and trusts his heart only to an inanimate object. Equally in short, he is everything Western culture has been trying to destroy for -- George Orwell would have argued this point -- the last 100 years.

Orwell's concept of the "unperson," deleted from history so thoroughly that it is as if they never existed, has haunted us since the publication of his masterwork, 1984: in fact it is an ancient concept, going back thousands of years to the Romans and Greeks and perhaps civilizations before them. In recent years, however, we have seen this concept applied to the field of entertainment rather than the political sphere, not merely through cancel culture, but via the subtler means of simply and quietly downplaying or making unavailable that "content" which runs against the grain of current thought. Nobody is actively trying to "cancel" Kirk: the character still exists within the STAR TREK universe. He is, however, a representation of everything Hollywood now despises: a rugged, self-reliant, charismatic, physically capable, sexually dominant male. Nowadays that label comes with consequences.

The war on masculinity is admittedly a right-ring talking point, which is why those who lean left gaslight themselves, and the rest of us roughly at the political center, by telling us there is no such thing. But one cannot entirely ignore the evidence of one's eyes in this regard, and both anecdotal experience and the facts, data and statistics demonstrate that masculinity in its traditional form is sharply on the downgrade, both in the number of males who fit the definition, and in the broader sense of masculinity being perceived by society as something valuable and virtuous, rather than "toxic" and threatening. And this is particularly painful and alarming to me for reasons both intensely personal and otherwise.

As a kid, growing up on STAR TREK reruns, I idealized Kirk to the point where I actually grew and maintained the up-and-over hair part and sharp sideburns that adorned him in the show. To me, Kirk was everything I was not, but aspired to be: a leader of men, a lover of women, a warrior with philosophical principles...in short, an adventurer. I cannot tell you the number of crises in my young life that I overcome at least in part because I relied on Kirk as an example of how to behave. And indeed, it seemed to me, looking at life in a broader and more historical perspective, that America had become as successful as it was in large part due to the fact that Kirk, in his own way, was a reflection of idealized American masculinity (I appreciate the irony here: Shatner is Canadian, and Hornblower was British, but on we go). The men who had defied King George III, who had stood up to each other at Gettysburg, who
had stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, were very much in the Kirkian vein. Like everyone living in this land, I owe them a debt, and while I never went farther down that road than registering for Selective Service (the draft) when I was 18 years old, I was prepared to pay it if called to do so. I think most of the men of my generation were as well, provided they felt the cause worthy of their life's blood and in tune with the principles of their conscience. This is, after all, still a democracy, and living in a democracy means nothing if one is not prepared to defy the government over a matter of sincere principle. But the fact remains that Kirk is an archetype of masculinity and nations that wish to survive in the long run must not only have such archetypes in their popular culture, they must be able to produce reasonable facisimilies of them in the general population. Nowadays, watching the Ukrainians defend their homeland against relentless assaults from a larger, more populous, and more powerful neighbor, I am grateful for their moral and physical courage, but I am also troubled, because I sincerely doubt my own country could produce a similar effort from its men if duty required it. I am not referring to those already in uniform, but to the vast body of men who are not, but may be needed. Questions of patriotism thrust completely aside, it boils down to whether a sufficient supply of real men -- of Kirks -- exists to take up arms in the crises to come. Too many of us have abrogated the responsibilty that comes with our balls, the obligation to be first in harm's way when the ship is sinking. The credo of the supposedly toxic man of yesteryear was, after all, "women and children first."

Generations ago, Orwell warned us in his essays about the practical consequences of discrediting physical courage in popular culture: he was a farseeing man, and he understood that societal mores are a weathervane which predicts the future weather of a nation. The question the erasure of Kirk brings to mind is: will there be enough Kirks left to withstand the storm which all of us know is coming?

DUMBING IT DOWN

Like Grandpa Simpson, I need little in the way of provocation to go on a tirade about something I find annoying, wicked, or just plain stupid. In this case I was set off by a single line of dialog in Denise Villeneuve's cinematic adaption of Frank Herbert's all-time sci-fi classic, DUNE. The most cerebral character in the entire sprawling cast, a man who is quite literally a human computer capable of staggering feats of mental computation, Thufir Hawat, gets on the radio and tells his fellows, "OK... we're good to go."

I am not sure what the writing team behind this adaptation was thinking when they made the decision to cram contemporary banalities in the mouths of what are essentially erudite Medieval characters...well, actually, I am sure what they were thinking, and that is what upsets me. If I may presume to read their minds, they were thinking what almost everyone else in Hollywood has been thinking for the last 25 years: DUMB IT DOWN.

You can say what you want about David Lynch's 1985 adaptation of DUNE, but you can't say the dialog was all that much out of tune with the way Herbert wrote it in his novel -- sometimes cerebral, sometimes mystical. But even when it was terrible, it was, so to speak, in-universe. When Gurney Halleck tells Paul Atriedes, "Guard yourself for true!" we understand that this is the way they talk in the DUNE world: we don't need Gurney to say "Put up your dukes, shit's about to pop off!" to understand his meaning. Whatever the ultimate result of Lynch's cinematic effort, he wasn't afraid of Frank Herbert's towering intellect, and he trusted us to "get it."

One could argue with considerable force that cinema has never been an intellectual stronghold, but this argument, while viable and packing plenty of ammunition, is far from invincible, because while vastly outnumbered, film, and yes, even television ("that bottomless pit of shit" as Stephen King once called it) also have long traditions of producing much which is thought-provocative. Arthouse cinema specializes in this, but the now-vanished mid-budget movie is where much of what was truly creat in cinema found its roots, and as late as 2007 were still producing winners. Meanwhile, the peak of witty, clever, intelligent stories making their way to the big and small screen was roughly around this same time, when entertainment made by such people as Dick Wolf, David Simon, David Chase, Joss Whedon, Chris Carter, Chris Haddock, Shawn Ryan, Amy Sherman-Palladino, etc., etc. either reached maximum popularity or its maximum level of cultural influence. It was more or less expected by this point that anything which wanted to be taken seriously within its field -- even comedy -- had to bring a higher standard of dialog, a larger and more obscure array of pop-cultural references, wittier banter, and so on to the table. The rigid, cliche-ridden, unchallenging formulas of the 80s and early-mid 90s had been smashed, and in their place were stories actually pitched at the adult level. Exposition was cut to the bone: audiences who didn't understand what they were seeing were challenged to figure out in in context. The presupposition of this crop of writer-producers was that audiences were smart, and would be able to keep up. And they were right.

It was, however, also around this very rough period that we saw the next generation of "creators" begin to helm their first major projects. In particular, in 2009, J.J. Abrams got hold of one of the most beloved -- and intelligent -- franchises in history, STAR TREK, and proceded to give it a frontal lobotomy. Gene Roddenberry's ground-shattering sci-fi show had tackled complex moral issues, and created characters who were just as smart, thoughtful and principled as they were daring: hence the show's enduring legacy. Abrams' reboot was an embarrassment, a noisy, empty-headed action film less memorable than the taste of the popcorn you ate when you watched it. I'll never forget the obscene rant of one guy on Tumblr, who howled "Abrams decided he would 'honor' the memory of Star Trek's most beloved Lady [Uhura] and turn her character into a dumb whore that Kirk fucked and promptly forgot about." However, as a more sober Michael Hare wrote in Film Experience at the time: "[Abrams' movie] is homogenized Star Trek, but that's less the fault of J.J. Abrams than it is merely a result of the current cinematic culture as a whole."

Hare was right: Abrams' unoriginal, one-dimensional and vacuous as his movies are, is merely a symptom of a generational problem: characters are only as smart as the people who create them. For the last 30 years or more, our culture has been engaged in a slow but systematic purge of everyone, in every field, who actually knew what the fuck he was doing. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, "modern" feminism, and the unrelated, but parellel "cult of youth" which assumes anyone 40 or older is evil or useless, we have managed to do away with the technical class which serviced us creatively, without actually training their replacements. The modern crop of writers and directors were promoted far too quickly and given entirely too much power: even the very talented ones lacked the seasoning of their seniors, men and women who had come up slowly through the ranks of writers' rooms, who had learned their craft through apprenticeship: the result is a collision of ignorance and arrogance, which produces from its impact only mediocrity, a mediocrity which shakes the bar loose of its old, lofty standard and drops it to a level where as visually sumptuous a film as the new DUNE can have characters say shit like, "OK, we're good to go."

The anti-intellectual element of so many modern movies and television shows, their faux-cleverness, their vulgarity, their deafening volume, their substitution of stale political bromides for plots, and archetypes for characters, are the result of people who are either stupid themselves, were picked for the wrong reasons (sex, gender, race or age rather than skill and passion) or who have been directed by higher-ups to knock thirty or forty IQ points off the script so as not to intimidate the sheep-like masses they believe audiences to be. But audiences are not anywhere near as sheep-like as cynics like to think. They do not need dialog or concept to be dumbed down. They may want it occasionally -- mindless entertainment definitely has its place -- but need it? From OPPENHEIMER to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and back again, we have ample evidence that what matters to audiences is that they be entertained, challenged, provoked, forced to think or at least to feel, and that assuming them stupid and witless is not only cynical and self-defeating, it's wrong from a purely practical standpoint. Put another way, it's bad business.

You will think by now -- and possibly be right -- that I am kicking a mole hill into a mountain. But if there's one thing I'm good at, it's seeing the underlying, even unconscious motives in what seem like harmless artistic and cultural compromises. In the last 35 years we have already seen the human attention span artificially shortened, first by the increasing use of razzle-dazzle, frame-fucked, MTV-style editing in the 90s, and then later, through the popularity of mobile devices and their accompanying effect on the dopamine centers of the brain. The ability to concentrate, to think critically, to apply logic to situations is visibly dying before our eyes. The last thing we need are the most intellectual of our intellectual properties being turned into "content" because the directors entrusted to bring them to the screen aren't smart enough to understand them. Let the stupid stick to their own lane. The one we're in is narrow enough as it is.

GOODREADING, 2017 - 2023

I've been participating in the Goodreads Challenge for about seven years now, and I guess that comes to about 120 - 140 books all told: not an impressive total, and indeed, less than some true bibliophiles read in a single year. This got me thinking, however. How much do we really retain of the books we read? Does a person who puts away a book a week, or 100 a year, or even more, actually remember any of what they read? At my highest pace of book reading, I polished off around 26 full-length books in one year, and realized that a few of them had left no impression upon me at all. I barely remembered a word. Now, some of that may come down to bad writing, or inattention on my part, but it is curious, is it not, what we retain and what we forget?

Here are some of the books that really stand out in my memory over the last seven years, for good or for ill:

Charlton Heston: The Actor's Life 1956 - 1976 -- This is a remarkably readable and beautifully written diary-memoir maintained by Chuck Heston during the full flower and prime of his career. He discusses his personal and acting life in remarkably honest, clear-headed terms, discoursing on fatherhood, marriage, money, travel, politics (both SAG and American), the personalities of actors and directors he worked with, and the fickle nature of Hollywood. He's an arresting writer with a stinging wit and a powerful observational eye, whose strong, rather progressive moral sense is tinged with the rather forboding knowledge that he will become a deeply conservative man in old age -- a prophecy which came true. Should be mandatory reading for every actor and anyone interested in the acting life.

Uprising Everyone's favorite human cyclone of controversy, David Irving, wrote a truly noteworthy account of Hungary's failed, tragic uprising against communism in 1956, which has never come close to being equaled by any English-speaking historian. (Michner's THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU is a cartoon by comparison.) Irving's unrivaled ability to dig out firsthand source material was outweighed only by his ability to make people angry, and he details -- uncomfortably, but even Christopher Hitchens agreed, accurately -- how the Nazi massacre of Jews in the early 40s led to, or accelerated, the popularity of communism among European Jewry, which in turn led to communism in Hungary being perceived as a Jewish concern by its victims, and the revolution of '56 therefore a kind of pogrom. Whatever your take on Irving or his thesis, however, this is a compulsively readable book, meticulously researched, and I failed to detect any actual anti-semitism in it, just uncomfortable facts which stemmed from an even larger tragedy: the Holocaust which preceded it. Given the Israel - Palestine war, itself a result of preceding tragedies, it has a curious timeliness.

Across the River and Into the Trees I have read most of Hemingway's novels and short stories, and this novel, which Charles Whiting once referred to as "a bitter, irrational, cynical book" is...well, a genuine failure. It is so strikingly off key and clumsy that it stands out in my memory as a kind of testament to the fact that even the greatest literay figures are capable of totally tanking it. The story of a dying American colonel just after WW2, embarked in a foolish romance with a much younger woman, it opens strongly, but quickly disintegrates into a sloppy hodge-podge of terrible dialog, childish one-dimensional characters, and Hemingway cliches. (One of the dangers of being famous for your literary style is that you can easily become its prisoner. Hemingway began his career satirizing writers he considered trash, and at this point sounded like someone satirizing him.) Even in the muck of the plot, however, there are flashes of genius, and of fearlessness. It's a bad book, but it's not really a forgettable one.

Beau Geste. Percival Wren may or may not have served in the French Foreign Legion: nobody really knows; but his novel on the subject is certainly a cornerstone of Legion lore. Though overwritten to a numbing degree, it is also beautifully, even gorgeously, prose-written: the story of English brothers who join the Legion to save their honor after being blamed for a jewel theft, it is a double mystery, woven into a grand adventure story set in French Sahara. Though Wren's characters tend toward national stereotype -- the Americans in particular -- it's a lovely novel that examines both English country life in all of its rigid Edwardian morality and silliness (people doing outrageous things for the sake of family honor), and the curious combination of romance and savagery that the Legion (and colonialism) represented.

Not Bad For A Human Lance Henriksen is one of the most prolific actors of the last 50 - 60 years. I doubt most people know his name, but few would fail to recognize his weather-worn face or deep, gravelly voice. In this incredibly enjoyable autobiography, he takes us through his remarkable and inspiring life, in which a tragic boyhood, a vagabond gypsy period, and a failed stint in the Navy ended up producing a first-rate actor whose gentleness, thoughtfulness and positivity inspire everyone around him. He's worked with everybody and done everything, from huge franchise flicks to TV series to "alimony movies" he'd rather forget. Yet Henriksen puts on no airs; he bears no grudges; his basic philosophy is that the world has enough shitheads in it as it is, there was no need for him to join their ranks. I met the man once, and he is no phony. He lives it. Great book. Great guy.

An Accidental Cowboy If you grew up in the 80s, you know Jameson Parker from either SIMON & SIMON or John Carpenter's rather cerebral horror movie PRINCE OF DARKNESS. In this mesmerizing little book, Parker examines how he, a well-educated, well-traveled, successful actor with rather happy go lucky nature, ended up improbably abandoning Hollywood to become a California ranch hand. Shot twice by a lunatic over a trifling dispute, Parker struggled with chronic depression, suicidal ideation and severe social anxiety, and found in cowboy life a therapy that saved his life. A beautiful examination of modern American Western life, dying traditions, the effects of PTSD, as well as a personal memoir, it is beautifully written and constructed almost like a suspense story or mystery novel. I was so moved by this book I e-mailed Parker to congratulate him, and he kindly responded with his thanks.

Foundation I finally got 'round to reading Isaac Asimov's original FOUNDATION trilogy, and I confess that I now get just how deeply he influenced almost every science-fiction writer who came after him, either directly or indirectly. While Asimov certainly has his limitations as a novelist, and his characters tend toward the paper cutout type, the story he tells is awesome in both scope, ambition and imagination. The story of the downfall of a vast galactic empire, its heroes are not swashbuckling rebels but fugitive scientists who believe they can predict the future and ultimately save it. Cerebral but fast-paced, combining intrigue and strategy with anthropology and sociology, it hits its strongest stride in the second volume, but is largely enjoyable and remarkably imaginative the whole way through.

Asylum - Carly Rheilan is a somewhat reclusive English novelist whose long career in social work produced this quietly masterful mystery-suspense story about African refugees living in prison-like conditions in London, and the people who try to help them...or exploit them. Not at all a story I thought I'd like or be interested in, it slowly weaves a tale about human trafficking, the after-effects of tragedy, the plight of refugees, the difficulty of cultural interchange, and the ways man-made systems (criminal and legitmate) can crush the human spirit, which is deeply moving and occasionally even funny. Its protagonists are flawed and relatable, and its villain, Christmas, is probably the most terrifying depiction of a pure sociopath I have ever encountered in a novel.

King of the Gypsies Bartley Gorman V was a bare knuckle boxer known in the traveling community as The King of the Gypsies, going more or less undefeated over 60 brutal, no-quarter, illegal matches over many years. This book is his riveting autobiography, the story of a proud, thoughtful man, an English gypsy who took up the gypsy bareknuckle tradition of his forebearers (Tyson Fury, current heavyweight champion, is a relation) and unapologetically embraced the violence, pain, jealousy, intrigue, money, glory and woe that followed his assumption of the crown. Fascinating, funny, and tragic, part biography, part bareknuckle boxing history, and part exploration o Traveler culture, it is the story of the ultimate outsider -- a gypsy -- who dove headfirst into the ultimate outside profession: barekuckle boxing.

My Wicked, Wicked Ways Errol Flynn was and is a synonym for degeneracy: the phrase "in like Flynn" is a specific reference to his prowess with the ladies. But buried beneath all the screwing, drinking, philandering, adultery, perversion and selfishness was a man with a surprisingly incisive mind, a surprisingly skillful pen, and an eyebrow popping backstory, who came to understand, and to regret, that he wasted his life and his talent making increasingly derivitive swashbuckler movies and cultivating a reputation he was addicted to, but despised. Flynn's autobiography is lengthy, and full of cons, hustles, seductions, crude pranks, alimony payments, and bad behavior, almost to the point of tedium and occasionally to the point of disgust; but it's also the story of a man humbled by life, who discovers looks, money, fame and women cannot fill the void in his life. Before his premature death, he had become a novelist, documentary film-maker, pilot and yachtsman, and was plainly trying to escape the self-built prison in which he lived.

Tales of the Jazz Age F. Scott Fitzgerald is rightfully referred to as the spirit of his era, and this collection of stories proves it. Running the range from the fantastic to the comic, the pathetic to the tragic, it showcases both his talents, his range of interests, and his proclivity for both portraying the silliness and the vulgarity of his time and his awareness that it was silly and vulgar. "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is a work of genune imaginative genius and drips with sarcastic joy about the evils of greed and materialism, but the sadness of "The Lee of Happiness" is difficult to shake, and the ending of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is haunting.

Crosses in the Wind This is the only book I've ever read about how an army at war cares for its dead. Written by William Shomon, who commanded a Graves Registration company during WW2, it is a terse, well-written, diary-like account of his service in France and Germany in WW2, from D-Day to the end of the war and after. Fascinating, moving, and respectful, it describes in detail the enormous lengths the U.S. Army went to locate, identify, and bury its dead soldiers. He describes the rituals by which bodies were recovered, washed, examined, fingerprinted -- and if necessary, X-rayed -- before burial. He describes the way the cemetaries were built, right in the middle of the war. And he describes life in the field, which included being bombed by the German air force, shelled, and so on. This is a genuinely important book, and speaks volumes about the fundamental humanity that underlay a vicious war.

The Bridge on the River KwaiMost people have seen the pic movie. Not as many have read Pierre Boullet's novel from whence the movie was drawn. And they should, because it's one helluva book. Although set in WW2, it is really a novel about pride, duty, and ego, specifically as it manifests in a battle of wills beteen a sadistic but desperate Japanese POW commandant charged with building a bridge with slave labor, and a snobbish, pathologically inflexible British colonel who is theoretically his prisoner, but in other ways both his master, his nemesis, and his willing minion. Boullet is a fine writer, but he's also a smart one, smart enough to get out of his own way and let the reader draw the morals from this complex moral tale, in which a man is so blinded by honor he willingly commits treason.

The Poetry of William B. Smith Arguably the scariest-looking actor in the history of Hollywood, the dark-eyed, muscle-bound, coarse-voiced Smith looked like he killed and ate babies for breakfast and enjoyed every second of it, and that was usually the sort of characters he played. Monsters. Brutes. Baddies. My God, he was the only man manly enough to play Conan the Barbarian's father. In real life he was more interesting than any fictional character: hall of fame bodybuilder, expert martial artist, stuntman, linguist, UCLA professor, NSA intelligence operative...and poet. This rather prosaically titled book lays bare the soul of a man who was almost incredibly thoughtful, ingenious and complex: patriotic, antiracist, fascinated by life and its ironies, imaginative in the extreme, unnerved by the impositions age were making on his body, plagued by fears, all of it comes out in these poems. While he's not uber-talented technically, he makes up for this with passion and sincerity. It's less a book of poems than a tour through his mind, and what a tour it is. They don't make 'em like Smith anymore.

I could go on, but I think this is a good sampling of some of the most memorable books I've read in the past six or seven years. I deliberately left out most of the history books, because I read so many of them in comparison with everything else that they deserve their own blog; I also left out Joseph Heller's Now and Then, one of the three most boring books I've ever read, because while the memory of the boredom is real, writing even a brief review would cause me to pass out over the keyboard. All I can say about that bowl of sawdust is that it's a warning never to write a memoir if you admit you lack any sense of sentimentality about your past. Anyway, and in closing, I'd like to add that it is impossible for me to think about some of these books without remembering where and how I read them: Heston's diaries, for example, very definitely belong to my back yard in Burbank -- the gate by the orange tree. Flynn's autobiography, in contrast, was the first book I read when I first moved back to York, and I had to lie on a beanbag in my living room to read it because at the time I had no furniture. I opened this ramble by asking if people really retained what they read, and I close it by asking if they, too, remember books not merely in terms of the books themselves, but the slice of life they collect from us when we read them?

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART ONE OF THREE)

"Memory lane" is a phrase designed to evoke nostalgia. It presupposes a past which is enjoyable to revisit. This is not necessarily wrong, but it is rather limited in vision. We should picture this particular Memory Lane not as a pleasant, attractive-looking suburban street with sprinklers chuffing, power-mowers droning, and kids being pulled along in red wagons by their dads, but rather as a long walk through Middle Earth. You remember Middle Earth? It's got the Shire and hobbitons, but it's also got Mordor. In other words, if you walk far enough, you'd encounter both the loveliness of nature, quaint and charming villages, and well, a marshy, rocky wasteland inhabited by monsters, riddled with sinister-looking architecture, and whose dominant geographical feature is a volcano that belches poisonous smoke. In other words, there's a lot to reccommend here, and there's a lot which we'd be better off avoiding. But if you're going to explore, you've got to actually explore, and that means spending time with smelly, brutish orcs as well as cuddly, pipe-smoking Hobbits.

It's the same way with our television and movie memories. When I poke around in the past, I can't just stick to what worked. Sometimes I have to examine what did not. And sometimes, as in the case that follows, I have to do both. And when I talk about "V," it's necessary for me to clarify what the hell I'm actually talking about. In this case it is not one but three things:

"V" - the two part miniseries (1983)
"V: The Final Battle" - the three part miniseries which followed (1984)
"V: The Series" - the weekly television show which ran from 1984 - 1985

"V" is such a colossal subject to tackle, such a long journey to make, that I must break it up into three separate stages. During those legs of our trip, we will encounter a lot which is good, a lot which is depressingly relevant to today's political situation worldwide, and a great deal which is just trash. The whole of the expedition, however, is necessary, as you will soon discover.

Our fist steps take us to the original miniseries. I was around ten or eleven years old when "V" debuted, and as with a few other cultural phenomena of the time, you really had to be there to appreciate just how big an impact "V" had on television. The 1980s were both the peak and the beginning of the end of the golden age of big-budget TV movies: by the end of the decade, cable TV began to cut deeply into their ratings, and they began to disappear from the cultural map. In 1983, however, they still occupied dizzying heights, and "V" had all the halmarks: a big budget, a huge cast, lavish costumes, the best special effects possible, and a simple yet ambitious story.

"V" is the story of an alien but human-appearing race, dubbed The Visitors, who suddenly appear in the skies over Earth in dozens of enormous spacecraft. The Visitors proclaim friendship and promise to cure Earth of its ills with their superior technology, asking in exchange only some raw materials they require to restore their dying homeworld. A few humans are suspicious, but the Visitors seem sincere, deliver on some of their early promises, and quickly co-opt various journalists, politicians, police officials, and industrialists to their cause. At the same time, however, they begin to orchestrate, through their human puppets, a campaign against the scientific community on earth: some scientists simply disappear, others are forced out of their jobs, all of them are subject to harassment and intimidation. The Visitors also try to secure the loyalty of human youth by empowering the more weaker and more pliable sorts, who are rapidly corrupted by this power and become their willing tools. Soon they have become the de facto government of Earth, all the while proclaiming their friendship. An intrepid journlist eventually discovers the Visitors' human appearance is a sham: beneath realistic skin suits they are carniverous reptilian monsters, and have come to Earth to suck its natural resources dry, enslave some of the population, and, well, eat the rest. This journalist also discovers a few of the Visitors detest what their race is doing and work against the unseen "Leader" as a Fifth Column, an underground resistance movement. Eventually, a human resistance movement arises too, led by a refugee scientist and composed of people from all races and walks of life as well as a renegade Visitor, and begins the seemingly hopeless task of trying to overthrow the Visitors and their human collaborators and save the Earth.

"V" had a positively massive cast, too large for me to break down here. The principal heroes were Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), a two-fisted news cameraman who suspects the Visitors from the beginning, Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), a scientist who becomes the leader of a human resistance movement, and Willie (Robert Englund), a kindly Visitor who befriends the humans. The principal villains were John (Richard Herd), the Visitor's Supreme Commander, Diana (Jane Badler), a sadistic, scheming Visitor scientist meant to reflect Joseph Mengele and other Nazi war criminals; and Stephen (Andrew Prine), the suave, pitiless Visitor security chief. (There were however several characters meant to serve as archetypes which we will examine later.)

This was the original "V" in a nutshell. It comes off as more or less typical science fiction of the 1950s type, with its flying saucers and malevolent aliens, and it is also a rather impressive examination of the moral and psychological difficulties presented by joining a resistance movement, but there is an enormous distinction which helps elevate the series from mere entertainment into something which is -- sadly -- more relevant in 2024 than it was in 1983. "V" was an unsubtle but at the same time, surprisingly nuanced, allegory about fascism. Specifically, it explored how fascism subverts and destroys democracy, but it also examines, quite fearlessly, the appeal of fascism to the broad masses. Let us tackle this last point in order.

In "V," the Visitors arrive with an impressive display of power -- fifty gigantic motherships, each of which is the size of a major city and presumably holds a corresponding number of "people." Having dazzled Earth with their arrival, they proceed to make a series of promises which seem too good to be true, because they are; nevertheless, most people fall for them. And those who receive the Visitors warmly are in fact rewarded, while those who express suspicion or opposition either disappear without explanation, are "converted" through a form of mind-control torture, or are subject to every form of harassment, forcing them into an underground existence. An entire class of people who could see through the Vistors' facade, scientists, are essentially dehumanized through a propaganda campaign carried out by a co-opted media, and presented as traitors to their own planet: those who do not go into hiding are ultimately killed. The unveiled reference to the Jews of Germany during Hitler's reign is too grossly obvious to mention, but the parallel way it is explored -- more on this in a moment -- is very effective. "V" warns us that fascism is a bait and switch, a fatal game of three card Monte, in which a malevolant magician first hypnotizes us, then picks our pockets, and then, if necessary, beats us into complete submission or simply kills us to get his way. Because by the time many humans have woken up to the threat of the alien magicians, it is too late: the military has been disbanded, police agencies have been co-opted, many brainwashed young people have become willing informers for the aliens, and Visitor troops are everywhere. Those who toe the line live priviliged lives and retain some power, while everyone else is simply used as slave labor or herded onto shuttles for one-way trips to a mothership. A great deal of the Visitors' plan rests upon the idea that corrupted humans will do a certain amount of the dirty work themselves, and they are not wrong in this belief. Three characters in particular epitomize "the collaborators" -- Daniel Bernstein (David Packer), Christine Walsh (Neva Patterson) and Eleanor Dupres (Jenny Sullivan).

Daniel who hails from a Jewish family whose patriarch is a Holocaust survivor, is presented as weak, immature, irresponsible and socially awkward teenager who is seduced by the Visitors to serve as a "youth leader," and is rapidly corrupted almost to the point of insanity by the power he possesses; power he uses to bully and humiliate others. Daniel has brief flashes of conscience after essentially destroying his own family, but always leans toward evil in the end: every time his Visitor mentor sees him weakening, he simply offers him more power, and Daniel always accepts.

Christine is an ambitious reporter who eventually becomes the Visitors' spokesperson on Earth -- in essence, she trades her journalistic integrity for influence, shilling shamelessly for the Visitors even when her ex-boyfriend, a member of the resistance, tries to reveal to her their true nature. Christine sells out completely for a time; she differs from Daniel, however, in that it is more naivete than ambition that corrupt her, and perhaps because of this, in the end she sacrifices her life to help expose the Visitors for what they are.

Eleanor is Mike Donovan's icily ambitious mother, the wife of a wealthy industrialist who sees the Visitors as a means to expand her own fortune and personal power. Beguiled by Stephen, the Visitor overlord who is eventually responsible for some of the worst atrocities the Visitors commit against humanity, she never has a single qualm about climbing into bed with them, and is willing to sacrifice both her marriage and her son's life to further increase her position.

By giving us these characters, "V" allows us to see the appeal of fascism is universal, and different people can arrive at that dark destination by very different routes. The character of Daniel, ably portrayed by Packer as both disgusting and pitiful, is to me is a hallmark of series creator Kenneth Johnson's genius. Making the principal sell-out Jewish, and not merely Jewish but the grandson of a Holocaust survivor who sees all too clearly what is happening, lifts the story from a mere allegory of Nazism to a much larger examination of why fascism (whatever it calls itself) can appeal to anyone, of any ethnicity or race. Daniel is not inherently evil. He's just an unhappy, lazy, weak-minded teenager with well-meaning but ineffectual parents and an unrequited crush on his neighbor's daughter, who rightly feels unseen and powerless; in other words, he's a typical discontented, slightly spoiled suburban high school kid. The Visitors offer him power, the first he has ever known in his life, and he immediately becomes drunk with it, and though he becomes a true monster, he is never beyond our understanding.

"V" also gives us two Visitor characters, the afformentioned Willie, and Martin (Frank Ashmore) who embody the idea that conscience is and always has been the enemy of fascism. The hapless Willie is ultimately too kind-hearted to serve in the Visitor army, falls in love with a human girl, and joins the human resistance. The tougher, more capable Martin, a Visitor security officer, is actually a leader of an antifascist resistance movement within the Visitor race, and joins hands with his human counterparts in hopes of liberating his own people from the tyrannny of their unseen "Leader." At one point, Martin gives Donovan a brief lecture on how lucky humans are to live among such abundance as Earth provides: he is referring to natural resources, but the message is plain -- enjoy your freedom, kid, because it may be gone tomorrow. In a show which was often incredibly heavy-handed, and could have portrayed all the Visitors as cartoonish monsters, it was refreshing to see this sort of nuance.

It is true that "V" suffered from all the stigmata of most 80s television shows. The weight of the allegory can be crushing at times. There are logic problems and plot holes that were obvious to me even as a ten year old boy. The Visitors, considering their advanced technology, are startlingly incompetent whenever the script requires them to be. The co-hero, Mike Donovan, though portrayed engagingly by Marc Singer, is a Mary Sue of the first caliber, and becomes more of one as the "V" universe progresses (in contrast, Grant's Juliet Parrish undergoes much more realistic struggles of conscience and confidence as she unwillingly evolves into a guerilla leader). In the end however, none of this really matters, because the essence of "V" is timeless. It is a warning, not about the danger of first contact with aliens, but about what we, human beings, are capable of doing to each other. It is a lesson about the fragility of democracy and decency, the tragic necessity of remaining permanently on guard against those who arrive with brass bands and flags a-flyin', offering us easy solutions to complex problems if only we'll part with a little...just a little...of our decency and personal freedom. In today's age, when certain American politicians are more or less openly employing the tactics of the Visitors to the adoring applause of their followers, it is a lesson we could stand to learn once more.

SECOND THOUGHTS ON FYRE FESTIVAL

It is now six years since the disastrous Fyre Festival came and went, and except for some entertaining YouTube documentaries and a few press pieces on the release of its organizer from prison, it is largely forgotten -- one more viral sensation consigned to the dustbin of internet history. It seems to me, however, that the whole sordid saga of Fyre -- how it came to be, how it failed, and the aftermath -- has something important to tell us about the state of the modern world.

For those who have indeed forgotten, or never cared to begin with, the Fyre Festival was a musical festival held in 2017 on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas, to promote the Fyre app, which was created to book musical talent. Fyre was the brainchild of an unknown "entrepreneur" named Billy McFarlane and fading rapper Ja Rule. After a brilliant internet marketing campaign, which featured famous models running through the surf and yachts swirling through crystal blue waters, approximately five thousand people showed up to enjoy "an immersive music festival ... two transformative weekends ... on the boundaries of the impossible." For hefty price-tags, concertgoers were to enjoy a slew of the world's hottest entertainment acts and gourmet food while staying in villas or luxurious tents on the beach. It was to be a party for the ages, but more than that, an opportunity for those with the means to be there to flaunt their presence to the world. Fyre was, as we used to say in the 80s "the place to be" for wealthy hipsters and social media influencers.

Though few people knew it, McFarlane had no idea what he was doing, and though many people knew it, they apparently ignored the fact that Ja Rule has never known what he is doing. They were the two of them, however, very good at bluster. McFarlane was a college dropout with no real business experience who bluffed investors into forking over enough money to secure celebrity endorsements and craft a slick marketing campaign. Rule was a clueless rapper on the far margins of relevancy hoping to revitalize his brand. Together they were able to generate a great deal of interest and publicity for the two-week event, but it was all smoke and remained smoke until it finally dissipated. Not only did they have no actual plan to bring the concert about, they had neither the money nor the time to execute one even had it actually existed. A concert on the scale they envisioned would have employed an army of hundreds if not several thousand workers, food service people, security, drivers, medical staff, etc., etc., and required massive quantities of construction materials as well as supplies of fresh drinking water, food, sanitation facilities, reliable elecricity and so on. Those (belatedly) consulting said they'd need an additional year (on top of the one they'd already had) and another $46 million in funds to make it happen. None of this existed by the time the concert began, and as a result most of the acts signed to perform canceled at the last moment: none ever performed.

At this point I defer to Wikipedia for what actually happened:

Initial arrivals were taken to an "impromptu beach party" at a beachside restaurant, where they were plied with alcohol and kept waiting for around six hours while frantic preparations at the festival site continued. McFarland had hired hundreds of local Bahamian workers to help build the site. Meanwhile, organizers had to renegotiate the guarantees they offered to the people who would be playing at the festival as costs spiraled out of control. Later arrivals were taken directly to the grounds by school bus where the true state of the festival's site became apparent: their accommodations were little more than scattered disaster relief tents with dirt floors, some with mattresses that were soaking wet as a result of the morning rain. The gourmet food accommodations were nothing more than inadequate and poor quality food (including cheese sandwiches served in foam containers).

Festival-goers were dropped off at the production bungalow where McFarland and his team were based so they could be registered, but after hours of waiting in vain, people rushed to claim their own tents. Although there were only about 500 people, there were not enough tents and beds for the guests, so they wound up stealing from others. Attendees were unable to leave the festival for the nearby Sandals resorts as it was peak season, with almost every hotel on Great Exuma already fully booked for the annual Exuma Regatta. Around nightfall, a group of local musicians took to the stage and played for a few hours, the only act to perform at the event. In the early morning, it was announced that the festival would be postponed and that the attendees would be returned to Miami as soon as possible.

Reports from the festival mentioned various other problems, such as the mishandling or theft of guests' baggage, no lighting to help people find their way around, an unfinished gravel lot, a lack of medical personnel or event staff, no cell phone or internet service, insufficient portable toilets, no running water and heavy-handed security. These problems were exacerbated as the festival had been promoted as a cashless event, leaving many attendees without money for taxi fare or other expenses.

Many attendees were reportedly stranded, as flights to and from the island were cancelled after the Bahamian government issued an order that barred any planes from landing at the airport. The first flight back to Miami boarded at 1:30 a.m. on April 28, but was delayed for hours due to issues with the flight's manifest. It was cancelled after sunrise, and passengers were locked in the Exuma Airport terminal with no access to food, water[26] or air conditioning; a passenger recalled that at least one person passed out from the heat and had to be hospitalized.

The failure went viral, with many ticket-holders livestreaming their discomfiture for millions to see, and "Fyre Festival" became a synonym for disaster. Some critics humorously likened what happened to LORD OF THE FLIES or THE HUNGER GAMES. A slew of lawsuits were filed, and Billy McFarlane eventually went to prison for fraud.

A surface examination of this debacle is always good for a few laughs. There is nothing quite like the collapse of a gigantic scam, be it Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos or Bernie Madoff and his ponzi scheme Madoff LLC; and there is nothing so satisfying as watching rich, entitled, over-privileged hipster/jet-setter/influencer types eat a little of the shit the common folk are forced to digest every day. A deeper examination, however, tells us a great deal about the effects that social media and the internet have had on human psychology, and the further, harmful effects those raised on this psychology can inflict on others.

Obviously there will always be people like Billy McFarlane: glib, shallow, irresponsible corner-cutters who will do anything for money except work for it are as old as civilization. He is nothing new, and he may not even consciously have intended to commit fraud when he hatched this scheme. In fact, I think it more likely that he believed he could pull it off, and, liars being most skillful at lying to themselves, believed to the very end that he could shuck and jive his way through the disaster that actually unfolded before him. The key phrase in "con man" is "confidence," after all, a word which has more than one meaning. No, what is interesting here is the very nature of the Fyre Festival. Three salient points come to view if we stop chuckling long enough to look for them:

1. It was built entirely around image;
2. It appealed to vanity, narcissism and a certain type of greed.
3. It hurt people who actually matter.

I think you would agree that most events -- sporting, musical, comedic, what have you -- are attended for the purposes of entertainment, which is to say enjoyment. One goes because one wants to go and expects to take pleasure in the experience as a thing in itself. When I saw Micky Ward fight Arturo Gatti at the Mohegan Sun, when I watched John Cleese tell jokes at the Strand, when I showed up to listen to John Williams conduct his orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, I did these things because I was hoping for the satisfaction of a particular, personal desire. I would have gone had I been the only one in the audience and no cameras permitted. Like you and your own public private passions, I am driven by love, active interest, or at least curiosity, in the subject matter. When I saw Mazzy Star in Ventura some years ago, the band forbade the use of cameras at the show, and shone no lights except for candles on the stage: they wanted the audience to enjoy the music, not mere spectacle.

The Fyre Festival, however, represents an advancement on an idea which used to exist only a small scale and for a particular group of people: those who considered it of vital importance "to see and be seen," i.e. people in the entertainment industry or the bored rich, the society-charity folk who value their press clippings as much as their money. The internet has made the idea of experiencing something strictly for its own merits and for one's own pleasure to be eccentric, even contemptible. Now, people collect experiences not for their own sake but to boast about it on social media and thus project a "curated life," the Instagram-sham existence in which frauds like Dan Blizerian sit in rented Ferraris in front of rented mansions with bevvies of bikini models who are being paid for their time, in the hopes that dupes on the internet will believe what they are seeing is an actual lifestyle. And the boasting is not of the ordinary kind, i.e. to make oneself look good, but one consciously intended to make others feel actively jealous. It is not an appeal to entertainment or enjoyment, but to vanity and narcissism and arrogance and even cruelty: it is a projection of raw capitalist fantasy, the idea that not merely a luxurious and hedonistic lifestyle is the apotheosis of human existence, but that it is a measure of worth -- human worth.

The Fyre Festival did more than dupe cretins of this type out of a few thousand dollars and some unearned dignity. Its impact was felt the most severely on those could afford it the least. To save money and to try and salvage what he could from the disaster, McFarland hired a very large number of local workers to make last-minute preparations at the site of the festival. None of these people were ever paid for their work. Innocent Bahamanians were harmed and in a few cases even financially wiped out, when their generous donations of food (to hungry festival-goers) went unremunerated: and this was the least-reported aspect of the entire squalid episode. Those (like myself, admittedly, at the time) who were deriving enormous pleasure from seeing modern-day Marie Antoinettes told there was no cake, paid little attention to the real economic hardship and pain this brought ordinary working people. My dismissiveness of this pain was probably part psychological: the story becomes less funny the more you think about the actual effects, so a superficial view is safest. But this is not a full answer. The truth is that ordinary working people are, under the internet rubric, not as important as people with money: actually less than human, lumpen, faceless drones, "non player characters" who ultimately don't matter. The temporary discomfiture of a few hundred trust-fund jockeys and well-heeled party girls is of far more interest to most than the actual suffering and ruination of an equal number of working stiffs.

One could argue forcefully that this too is as old as civilization, and one would be right; the difference is that this mentality used to be reserved to a very small proportion of the population, something at the five percent mark or less, and that these people kept as much to themselves as possible. The internet has figuratively dissolved the iron gates and stone walls that separated the nobleman, the robber-baron or tycoon, from the rest of us: it seems to exist primarily, in some spaces anyway, for throwing material success through those barriers and into our faces. "I live on a yacht. I own eight Lambos. I go to Vegas and drop a mil at the tables and laugh all the way to my private jet." Again, the point is not merely to boast, but to taunt. To lack empathy and sympAthy is one thing, but to incline toward this shallow form of sadism is quite another, and the internet has not merely legitimized it, it has fetishized it, twisted it into a species of virtue.

This at any rate is what I think about when I remember the Fyre Festival. It was a frank appeal to vanity, exclusivity, snobbery and that peculiar form of greed, the greed for attention and envy. It failed and ended in disaster, but its lessons went largely and perhaps totally unlearned. It had no substance, it was never anything but smoke, as indeed all the emotions it appealed to were smoke, but as any decent firefighter will tell you, it's always the smoke that kills you.

AS I PLEASE XXI: CHRISTMAS EDITION

Christmas, as Hans Gruber once remarked during a heist at Nakatomi Plaza, is the time for miracles. It's also a time for taking stock of the gifts life has given you, and that you have given yourself. So here we go:

* This year I managed to make travel once more part of my life. Aside from a few familiar places, I went to Dallas, Montreal, Quebec City and Miami, and in each place had experiences I will remember for the rest of my life, albeit in very different contexts. As much as I hate the act of traveling, I do very much enjoy being where I'm at, and in 2024 I plan on exploring as much unfamiliar territory as time and budget allow.

* I have now lost somewhere between fifteen and sixteen pounds since June. There is still a lot of work to do in this department -- I'd like to lose another 5 - 10 lbs, and then begin packing the muscle back on -- but everyone has to start somewhere and even a massive journey can be undertaken if one breaks it down into manageable stages.

* I'm something of a whore for literary awards, finding them compensation of a sort for all the frustrations and indignities a writer must endure, one of which is poverty, but this year was a rough one in that regard until SINNER'S CROSS took the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal in Historical Fiction. I had a good time in Miami and hope to return there next year for a new medal for a different book -- once a whore, always a whore.

* In Miami I met Burke Allen, who invited me to appear on the "Burke Allen's Big Time Talker Podcast," which streams on every platform imaginable. I recorded the show with him a few weeks ago and found him a superb host: the pace was fast, his questions were extremely incisive, and forced me to dig deep in what I laughably refer to as my mind for answers. The podcast should be live in a week or two.

* In Miami, aside from being able to attend the Festival of Books, I was also able to reconnect with an old teacher of mine, Scott Johnson, whose novel THROUGH THE WITCHES' STONE, took Bronze in the fantasy category. Scott's a great guy who regaled me with tales of visiting Hemingways' home in Key West, which is now upon my list of places I need to see.

* Because time waits for no man and I'm already a half-century old, I have set up an ambitious schedule of self-promotion in the coming year. You may have the chance to see my face -- or avoid it -- on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram before long, doing interviews, telling stories, and reviewing books, movies and television shows. I also plan on releasing audiobook versions of my novels, novellas and short stories. I have a few narrators in mind aside from yours truly, who (ahem) considers himself a rather talented vocal artist. The point is simply that you've got to get busy living before you get busy dying.

* On the writing front, I finished -- after 6 1/2 years -- SOMETHING EVIL, my epic horror novel. The draft is a fucking mess, and I foresee at least a year's worth of revisions and redrafts before it's even close to being ready for a formal, professional edit, much less any type of publication; but the relief I experienced when I typed "the end" (I had to do it, just to make sure the wretched thing was really dead!) was monumental.

* EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS (my fifth novel) is now available for pre-order on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle download. I slated it to drop on New Year's Eve, in large part because I realized I have released nothing new in 2023, and that doesn't sit well with me. EXILES was a big accomplishment for me in many ways: I tried a new genre, wrote the book quickly, and enjoyed the process enormously. CHRONICLES is something new for me: the stories are set in an alternate reality and follow, at various distances and through various eyes, the rise, fall, and possible resurrection of Magnus Antonius Magnus, a man whose unrestrained ambition wrecks the world several times over. A study of the effects of power on men, technology on people, and ambition on history, while taking equal interest in the accidents and absurdities that take equal part in unfolding events, it evokes vaguely DUNE-like vibes in its presupposition that fiction can be used to explore not only human nature but the systems human beings create to govern themselves and their world. That at any rate was the working ideal.

* I also began, and am in the process of finishing, the third CAGE LIFE novel, DARK TRADE, which whose first draft will be complete before New Year's Eve. This is the first time I've returned to the world of "crime noir" since 2016, and reuniting with my troubled protagonist, Mickey, and the various femme fatales, thugs and cops who populate his world was a bit like going on a date with a beautiful but dangerous woman: exciting, but highly unpredictable. CAGE LIFE was my first completed novel, my first published work, the first fiction I ever wrote that won an award -- the list of "firsts" is endless, and so I have quite a soft spot for the series. At the same time, I find writing it a thoroughly professional experience, because I am not attempting to be profound or "literary," merely entertaining, albeit in a somewhat more thoughtful way than most fiction of this type aspires to be.

* This year I also read twelve books, watched 44 movies I'd never seen before, and lost myself in a few newish, and a lot of classic, television shows. I was particularly delighted to view the first few seasons of the classic LAW & ORDER, which was truly excellent and groundbreaking television before it eventually hardened into sensationalistic formula. Even more pleasurable, in a guiltier way, was KOJAK, which features some of the very best pulp dialog ever written, silkily performed by Telly Savalas. Only a three-testicle apex male like Savalas could get away with shit like this: (takes fellow cop's coffee): "I owe you a dime, sweetheart." (takes sip, grimaces, gives coffee back) "On second thought, we're even."

There is, of course, more to tell. There were silly goals I set just for the sake of knocking them off -- doing 3,500 push ups in a month, for example -- and a few extreme long shots I took trying to get my name in front of people that matter in the entertainment world, which may or may not pay off. I found more job satisfaction in what I do professionally -- advocate for victims of crime -- this year than I ever have before, albeit at some cost to my mental and spiritual health: Everyone has a threshold of how much tragedy and vicarious trauma they can stand, and the time will come when I realize I have reached mine; but that time is not yet, and years of apathy and selfishness, debauchery and entitlement have got to be paid for with years of hard, sefless work. One thing I've come to understand (belatedly, the way I come to understand everything) is that as William Shatner says, you must say "yes" to life. You must realize that you can do enormous number of things and be successful at many or even most of them. You must break out of the restrictive identities others place on you and that you place upon yourself, and realize that anything that can be done by one person can be done by another -- only vicious egotism keeps us from believing otherwise. So I will wind this ramble up by saying what another Watson is now famous for saying: the best Christmas gift you can give, the miracle you can make, is to be the best version of yourself and give that person to the world.

Merry Christmas.

IN BUT NOT OF

To paraphrase my spiritual mentor, George Orwell, I think everyone who has given any thought to the matter at all would agree that the world is in a bad way. It has arguably never been in a good way, but there are degrees of badness, and in my life I have seen some pretty low lows. I am old enough to remember the oil crisis, the hostage crisis, stagflation, Iran-Contra, a lengthy and terrifying resurgence of the Cold War, 9/11 and its aftermath, the Great Recession, Covid, and various other nerve-wracking and emotionally and financially agonizing periods. However, if I had to choose a single issue which caused me more agony and fright than all the others, it would be...everyday life.

On the surface, this is a ridiculous complaint. I am a heterosexual man of pure European descent, born in the United States to the suburban middle-middle class. In other words, I won the birth lottery. I will never be bitten by a rat in infancy, turned into a child soldier, sold to a mining company, die of sleeping sickness, or work in a sweatshop (unless Hollywood counts). I will never be subjected to Shaaria Law, forced to carry a baby to term, subjected to a clitorectomy or forced into an unwanted marriage, or get blown to bits by a missile paid for by the American taxpayer and fired by an Israeli jet. I probably won't die from drinking contaminated water, starve to death, or have to sleep in a cardboard box beneath an overpass amid the stench of exhaust and urine. I hate the word "privilege" nowadays, but I freely confess than I am privileged by circumstances of birth: a great many of the opportunities I've had (or squandered) were unearned or otherwise handed to me by God, accident, Fate, or heredity.

I nevertheless find everyday life to be an incredible trial. I do not merely mean adult responsibility, oh no. I mean that since first grade (I enjoyed Kindergarten, or at least I think I did), I found myself in an almost continual war both with society at large, and with myself, for being unable or unwilling to function as others seemed to do. It would be easy for me to say that hyperactive, attention-challenged kids with artistic natures naturally hate school and find it difficult to navigate in what we refer to as "the real world," and this is in fact true: but my rebellion goes somewhat deeper than this. Even as a small child, I found the world that I inherited not merely to be unfair and hypocritical, but nonsensical almost to the point of madness. Of course I could not articulate this as a small child; it presented me with difficultly even in high school, because I did not have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge necessary to codify what I couldn't stand about modern life without sounding like a whiny dreamer with lazy streak. And in fact I am 100% certain many people, including members of my own family, cataloged me this way, just as I am certain that I deserved at least some part of this approbrium: but I'm equally certain that the feelings that manifested as these characteristics were valid. Allow me to use one small example from school.

When I was growing up, and all the way into graduate school (the highest level of education I have completed), I saw that about 90% of the things I was being taught were taught by virtue of lectures: proof of comprehension was achieved by rote memorization followed by multiple choice tests. I knew, and it has subsequently been proven beyond any possible doubt, that this method of education does not work. In fact, it is an exact reversal of how children, how all humans, are scientifically proven to learn: by example. By doing. Getting their hands dirty. People remember dissecting a frog. They do not remember being lectured on the internal organs of a frog. Furthermore, while students generally hate essay tests, they are 100% guaranteed to expose whether the learner has actually absorbed the information and synthesized it properly, and studying for them requires by necessity a much higher level of subject mastery: you cannot guess, so you must know. Any time I was exposed to teaching which allowed me to do these things, I not only learned, I retained. Yet only 10% of my teachers did this. They had to know their methods did not work, but they either didn't care, or could not themselves deviate from the teaching formula their employers mandated they use.

I believe that I have always on some level understood the value of time. It is the most precious thing we have, and we never have enough of it, yet mine was being wasted as, year in and year out, I was forced to listen to teachers blather and drone; to memorize by rote a series of dates, places, names, formulas, equations; to fill in bubbles on a Scan Tron sheet with a No. 2 pencil; and then, to forget, with astonishing rapidity, every goddamn bit of what I had "learned." My bitterness grew as I went to college and began to pay vast sums for the privilege. By and large I learned very little, and I do not believe for a moment most of my teachers or the institutions they represented actually gave a damn. It was all, or very nearly all, complete nonsense: a dull, rigid, complex, drawn-out ritual which exists for reasons nobody really wants to admit if they even understand it at all.

The working world was no different. Studies have proven over and over (and over) again that the eight-hour workday is pointless, that early start times are deleterious to health and productivity, that happy employees work much harder of their own volition than unhappy ones, that a three-day weekend would work wonders for employers and employees both, and that things like working remote, hybrid employment, nontraditional office spaces, longer lunches, pets in the workplace, later start times, etc., etc. actually make workers much more efficient. And yet, with the exception of a few employers I encountered in the entertainment industry, every business, public or private, I've been involved with sticks mindlessly, ruthlessly, and self-destructively to the same outdated, inefficient, misery-inducing model that has existed since industrialism or before. Resistance to change is ferocious; sometimes it takes on the character of active hostility, even hatred, toward the employed. ("This is the way we do it here and if you don't like it, quit.") And this creates a negative cycle in which the employee adopts the Office Space mentality of viewing his employer as the enemy rather than a benefactor or an ally and doing only the bare-ass minimum necessary to avoid being fired. The cycle completes itself with the employer marveling in sincere if misplaced outrage that they cannot get any good people; or getting them, cannot keep them.

Society, at least in my own country, also confused and disgusted me mightily from about the age of twelve onward. I was told my country drew its philosophical roots from the Puritans and their ethic of ascetisicm, faith and hard work, but all around me what I saw was gross commercialism replacing religious belief, and a snobbery that maintained inherited wealth was more virtuous than working for a living. Like Orwell, I saw cruelty and sadism rewarded; intellect and curiosity derided; morals and decency regarded as sniveling weakness; and any actual belief systems or personal honor regarded as naivete to be exploited. I was told that military service was noble, but saw veterans treated like condom wrappers; that "freedom isn't free" but also that "middle class boys don't go into the army -- that's for poor kids." (Evidently freedom still wasn't free, but it was only the poor kids who had to pay for it.)

Some of this, of course, was simply the ordinary discrepancy that exists between ideals and reality, but more of it came from feeling as if this discrepancy was intolerable to me as a human being. Me, Miles Watson, personally. In other words, it might suit, or at least prove acceptable, to others, but I was not built for it. I couldn't go along to get along. I had to point out the absurdity, the inefficiency, the stupidity of the world around me, for the sake of my own sanity; yet this sort of talk was far from welcome to most of those around me. It was either ignored, ridiculed or actively punished; the few who agreed usually placed a caveat at the end of their agreement to the effect that, "Yeah, it's nuts, but you've got to accept it: it's the way things are." My trouble stemmed from the fact I could not accept it. To me, the choice was between swallowing the hypocrisy of society, and pointing out that virtue and money were not only unsynonymous but usually incompatible, that systems designed to help us had not only hurt us but become our masters, was not initially a choice. I felt that I had to rebel.

By now you probably think this entire essay is a form of boasting, and you'd be right to deduce this: but here comes the twist. My rebellion was a complete failure and served only to cause myself and many of those close to me great pain. I will not describe it here, except to say that I most resembled Gordon Comstock, the laughable protagonist of Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who makes a "war on money" in the deluded belief that poverty and rejection of societal norms constitutes virtue. In fact, all rebels equate failure with virtue: the whole history of the punk rock movement is testament to this. It is a doomed attempt to invert the rules of society, and render the poet starving to death in his garret more noble than the upper middle class kid who thinks having to pump his own gas is "roughing it."

Of course millions of people feel as I did at any given moment. It is supreme egotism to assume that one's inner world, one's inner landscape as it were, is unique or even special; but prior to the existence of the internet there was no way for people like myself to grasp that we were, and are, far from unusual. The hermetically sealed world I grew up in did not allow for the sort of "online communities" which are a normal part of life today. Anyone who deviated from the norm too far in any direction was bound to face ridicule and hostility from his peers, his parents, his teachers, and society as a whole. Indeed, society is defined as "the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community." One cannot have an ordered community, more or less, if too many people stray too far from the norms. This is pathetically obvious, but it took me decades to grasp its full meaning: individual rebellion allows a person to egoistically attack what he dislikes in his community, while still benefitting from the advantages a community offers. Too many rebels = destruction of "the system," which sounds great until the power goes out. I had always been drawn to fictional characters who were "in but not of," because I could relate to them, but I was very slow in understanding that these characters inevitably served the same system or society which rejected or marginalized them. These characters had to work within their envrionment despite their deep philosophical disagreements with how it was managed, and their persistent feelings of emotional isolation.

Around the age of 30 I tumbled to the works of Ernst Jünger, the brilliant writer, novelist, metaphysician and philosopher, who often tackled what he saw as the problems of the modern world through abstruse novels like "The Glass Bees," "Aladdin's Problem," "On the Marble Cliffs" and others. It was in his novel "Eumeswil" that I encountered the character of Manuel Venator, whose struggles (like those of Gordon Comstock, or other Orwellian characters such as George "Fatty" Bowling or even Winston Smith) seemed to resonate with me. If you will excuse me quoting from Wikipedia, "The key theme in the novel is the figure of the Anarch, the inwardly-free individual who lives quietly and dispassionately within but not of society and the world. The Anarch is a metaphysical ideal figure of a sovereign individual, [as] conceived by Jünger."

The idea of the soverign individual is worthy of study in another blog (as is the concept of self-ownership), but the point I'm driving at here is that Jünger, who was born in 1895 and died in 1998 (at the age of 102), lived through a variety of political systems: the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, Allied occupation, West Germany, and finally the re-unified Germany of today. He commented that he had seen "flags fall like leaves on the ground in November" and at some point in his life seems to have made a conscious effort toward internal exile, a state in which the individual lives peacably within society but holds allegiances and moral codes inside himself which may be quite different from those of his fellows. In public, he goes along to get along; in private, he exists within his own nation-state with himself at the head.

Now, if this sounds more or less like how everyone lives once they come home from work and lock the door, it's important to stress that the condition of the anarch is merely a progression of the idea that "a man's home is his castle" and that we are, or ought to be, entirely free within our own homes. Where the anarch differs is that he takes the concept of freedom further: he creates for himself a kind of ideal plane which is transportable anywhere, including the street or the workplace. He builds an exterior which conforms to the grooves and tracks of society but he does not allow these grooves and tracks to mark his inner self. In other words, he does not internalize the values and norms of society as most people do whether they want to or not. He lives in a state of active, conscious rejection, without appearing in almost any way rebelious.

Why does this matter? Is it just a distinction without a difference, or even worse, a justification for a cowardly refusal to fight against societal injustice? Well, to start with, for those like myself, it is actually necessary for sanity and for self-respect. When you are "in but not of," society has explicity rejected you already: the question is merely whether you shatter yourself trying to fit the square peg into the round hole, or you develop a proper coping mechanism, which allows you to retain your sense of individuality and personal sovereignty. The distinction has a difference, because you are not simply "being yourself behind closed doors" -- you are "being yourself within your own mind" and refusing to let what you see as lunacy, or villainy, or stupidity seep inside of you. Is that cowardice? Many would say so. They would say that one must rebel against that which one perceives to be evil or unjust: but as I have noted above, there are some rebellions which are not only doomed to failure, they do not even achieve moral victory because they have no resonance, no impact on the larger world. Gordon Comstock's war on money achieves nothing but misery for himself and unhappiness for his friends and family: the pain ceases the moment he abandons it. Winston Smith's internal rebellion is crushed the moment it becomes external, and he himself is crushed into conformity with Oceanic society without achieving anything whatsoever. Fatty Bowling, on the other hand, realizes society is a swindle, but is willing to play the game provided he can escape through books and a few intellectual friendships. He of the three characters is closest to the anarch as Jünger envisioned him. He is, or becomes, "in but not of."

Again, all of this may seem like so much self-aggrandizing hair-splitting to the reader, or even a form of self-delsion. Perhaps it is, but I don't think so. The world we live in is insane and seems to be becoming moreso with the passage of years, and insanity, like a spill, tends to spread, and to stain. We have replaced religion with money, philosophy with psychiatry, patriotism with identity politics (or nationalism), common sense with ideology, morals with professional ethics. The consequences are inescapable if one adopts a passive internal state. Without active, conscious efforts to maintain one's own inner sense of sanity and integrity, we will, like Winston Smith, ending up loving Big Brother.

AS I PLEASE XX: HAPPY ACCIDENT EDITION

Yesterday I woke up feeling a little gloomy, because it was Sunday, and I have a lot of adult tasks to take on before, and after, I do anything enjoyable. I need to run errands. I need to do laundry and dishes. I need to pay, retroactively, for my recent trip to Miami. I need to have someone look at my alternator. None of that sounds the least bit fun. When I hit the street to get coffee, however, I noticed an unusually lively crowd upon the street, and soon realized it wasn't Sunday at all, but Saturday. The calendar in my head, never very reliable, was more confused than usual. This got me thinking about Bob Ross, and his signature remark, "We don't make mistakes in painting -- we have happy accidents."

In life, as opposed to painting, we do make mistakes which have no upside, no happiness attached to them. I have made more than my share -- quite a bit more than my share, actually. Yet the idea of the happy accident persists. The wrong turn that leads us in the right direction, the missed opportunity that leads us to a better one, the mislaid object that turns up years later at the exact moment it is most useful, are all experiences we have on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes the entire course of a life can be dictated by them. How many successful marriages, careers, and life choices are the result of a combination of careless mistakes and random chance coming together in a moment of incandescent good fortune? What follows is a short, random list of some of the happy accidents which have occurred to me, or others, and the effects the accident had upon the life in question. Some are trivial in the extreme, others incredibly profound. If one does not believe in Fate, then both call into question the role that random chance plays in our lives, the mockery it makes of all our plans and grand ambitions.

* Way back in 2002, I had a job interview scheduled for the early morning. The interview was in Maryland, and I still lived in Pennsylvania at the time, so I spent the night before at my mom's house. As I dressed, however, I realized I had forgotten my shoes. I could hardly go to the interview in a new suit and old sneakers, so I called my would-be employer, told a stupid lie about my car, and asked to reschedule for the afternoon. I then went on a farsical quest for dress shoes, only to discover absolutely nothing was open. I ended up paying $100 -- in 2023 prices, $160 -- at Banana Republic for a pair of very uncomfortable leather shoes which I seldom wore again, though they still darken my closet to this day. When at last I set out for my interview, I couldn't take my supposedly broken down car, so I hopped the Metro, which had a stop only blocks from the place I was going. Unfortunately for me, I still couldn't find it, and wandered about in ferocious late-summer heat as the time dwindled and sweat wilted my collar. At last, by sheer chance, I blundered into the business at the very stroke of the appointment time. I was flushed, out of breath, and uncomfortable (the shoes pinched). A secretary handed me a sheet of paper with questions I was going to be asked during the interview, and I left sweat-fingerprints on it. I both looked at felt like a disaster. I decided, right then and there, to chalk it all up as a loss. I went into the interview already having given up, and made no attempt to be impressive. I make jokes about my appearance. My to the answers to the questions were flip. I gave every impression of not giving a damn about whether I got the job or not, and walked out laughing at how badly the entire day had gone from the very beginning. You know what's coming, of course: I got the job. And I not only got the job, I got the $10,000 increase in salary from my previous job I had blithely demanded, which necessitated getting a promotion before I had even been hired. I had beaten out better qualified candidates on the strength of my utter indifference, which itself was the result of a series of stupidities on my part.

* In 1936, George Orwell was fighting in the Spanish Civil War on the Loyalist side. The Loyalists were a conglomeration of center and left parties which had remained loyal (hence the name) to the Spanish government and were fighting the Fascist-backed revolt of General Franco. These parties, which included socialists, communists, anarchists and constitutionalists of the more traditional democratic type, did not get along. Orwell had originally joined a Marxist militia called the Party of Marxist Unification, which refused to take its orders from Moscow (meaning Stalin) and was therefore unpopular with orthodox Communists. Orwell, whose political opinions were still forming at the time, was never content in this militia and wanted to fight for a purely Communist brigade, mainly because it saw more action at the front than his own outfit, the 29th. However, the day he was supposed to "see a man" about a transfer while on leave in Madrid, he found himself with indigestion from a too-heavy meal, and missed the appointment. Thus, he was still a member of the 29th Division when the Loyalist government suppressed the Party of Marxist Unification via a series of mass arrests. Orwell barely managed to escape Spain with his life, but before he did he saw firsthand his own group unfairly villified in the press and its members condemened to prisons without trial and in many cases, shot. The atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and betrayal haunted him for the rest of his life; so too did his understanding that the press, and history, could be altered to serve the whims of the ruling party. These fears proved the basis not only of his world view and politics generally, but led to "1984," which he wrote years later and changed the world forever. Had he transferred to the communist side, he admitted he would have been spared the purges and probably believed the official "line" that the Party of Marxist Unification had betrayed the government. The course of literary history was changed because he ate too much at lunch.

* When I was in college, I desperately wanted to join a certain fraternity. It was the only one on campus that I saw myself comfortably a part of, because it had no typical member. It was comprised of jocks, drunks, drug-users, artists, brawlers, brains, playboys and nerds. It is typical of my brain, however, that the more important something is to me, the more liklely I am to forget to do it, and on the night I was supposed to meet the brothers for an initial interview, I went to a house party and got drunk off my ass. By sheer chance I encountered another youngster on their way to an interview of their own, and tore an unteady path to the Student Union, arriving just in the nick of time. I am not the sort of drunk who shows their drunkenness: I don't slur words, stumble, or become belligerent or silly. I do, however, become more relaxed and confident, with all my social anxiety nicely boiled. The combination of having no time to worry about the interview and being accidentally plastered made me the perfect interviewee: the guy doing the questioning remarked, "You're hell in an interview, man!" I got a bid, pledged, was initiated, and thirty years later still count among the members of that fraternity many of my closest friends. All because I forgot I had the appointment and got lit up on warm, flat, cheap brew.

* In 1969, my friend William returned to New York City from a tour in Vietnam bearing deep physical and emotional scars. He was embittered by his experiences and by the difficulties he was having readjusting to civilian life -- unfortunately a very typical problem both for Nam vets and war veterans in general. One night, feeling footloose, he was on his way to a card game in Brooklyn when he passed a long line of young men waiting for entrance to a building. He asked one of them what they were waiting for. "A police entrance exam," came the reply. "To hell with it," he said, and joined the line, foregoing his card game. He took the test, passed, and was offered a spot in the next academy class. Twenty years later he retired a detective lieutenant, and went on to become a very successful private investigator, fiction and non-fiction author, and a Ph.D in Criminal Justice. All because he chose taking an exam over a seat at a poker table.

* In 2005, I met a beautiful girl for whom I fell head over heels. We dated briefly, and seemed to have the right chemistry for a serious relationship, but she was leaving to study abroad and I thought that was the end of it. Several years later I was in a now-extinct bar and ducked my head briefly into the poolroom. I don't know why: I wasn't looking for anyone, nor did I have an especial desire to play pool. I just walked in and walked out, then resumed my seat at the bar with my friends. A few moments later The Girl in Question appeared. She said she'd been shooting a game with friends of her own, saw me walk in, and followed me to my stool. She was single. I was single. We became a couple, and a few months later we moved to Los Angeles together. I had been fat (so speak) fat and happy where I was in life: I had a terrific apartment, a comfortable life, a wide circle of friends. My only real issue was a nagging feeling that I could do a lot more with my life, and that time was running out for me to do it. She proved the catalyst to up-end that particular hourglass and start life over anew, in a different place, where the risks and the stakes were both considerably higher. I spent the next twelve and a half years in L.A. All because of a random impulse to see what was going on next door.

* Speaking of L.A., and to wind up this Sunday entry of As I Please, here is a story I may have told before, but, well, never get tired of telling, because it seems to walk a fractured line between serendipity, luck, destiny and fate. Twenty-three years ago, I was at one of those periodic low points which help describe the arc of our lives on this planet. I was recently and unhappily single, bored and frustrated with my job, and struggling badly with my finances. I lived in a rather barren neighborhood, had serious issues with my car and therefore my social life, and my weekends were dismal: oftimes I wouldn't say a word to another human being between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. My sole interaction was a Sunday visit to the McDonald's drive-thru where I would order breakfast and coffee; my sole moment of happiness, or at least contentment, was an hour of sheer escapism. This came in the form of a show called The Lost World which aired on Sunday mornings. I'd eat, drink, and watch this sexier, somewhat more adult version of Land of the Lost, a childhood favorite, and for that hour remember what it was like to be footloose and fancy free, without adult responsibilities, worries and woes. I'd also permit myself the conceit of imagining myself in Hollywood, participating in the fabulous (I thought) world of make-believe. In point of fact, I'd sometimes sing the lyrics to 3 Doors Down's song "Be Like That:"

He spends his nights in California
Watching the stars on the big screen
Then he lies awake and he wonders
"Why can't that be me?"
'Cause in his life he's filled with all these good intentions
He's left a lot of things he'd rather not mention right now
Just before he says goodnight
He looks up with a little smile at me and he says
If I could be like that
I would give anything
Just to live one day in those shoes
If I could be like that
What would I do?
What would I do? Yeah....

Now in dreams we run

Cut to twenty years later, and I am on my way to a Halloween party in Los ANgeles. I stop off at my friend's house so we can go as a group, and lo and behold, there is a beautiful blonde present. It turns out to be the former star of The Lost World. I get an unexpected chance to tell her how her show provided the spiritual morphine I needed to get through a tough time in life, and the following year, she is my red carpet date at the Writers of the Future Awards in Hollywood. My sole remaining wish is that I could travel back in time and tell the 2000-ish version of myself that, well, now in dreams we are.

Was it chance? Was it the sort of happy accident to which Bob Ross liked to refer? Or was it Fate, or God's will, or some other sort of blind inevitability that surpasseth human understanding? I don't suppose I will ever know. What I do know is that whether it is all written in stone somewhere we cannot see, or whether it really is nothing but a series of random dice-rolls which occasionally run to hot streaks, it happened, and, thankfully, will happen again. We cannot avoid accidents, but the happier ones, like an episode of The Joy of Painting are always welcome.

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "MURDER, SHE WROTE"

I may be wrong, but frankly, I doubt it. -- Jessica Fletcher

I confess: I did it. I watched all twelve seasons of MURDER, SHE WROTE and the four full-length TV movies which followed its cancellation. That's 264 episodes (not including the movies) and boy, did that take some time -- and by time, I mean a couple of years. I don't actually remember when I began my quest, but it was probably 2020 or so. Why did I do this? Why spend those hours watching a rigidly formulaic, cozy mystery show that ran its course decades ago? The answer, on the surface anyway, is profoundly simple: I enjoyed it. There is a deeper mystery, however, to why I was able to stick with the project, and for once, it is not "nostalgia." We will however address that riddle presently. For now -- and I'm going to resort to these cheap puns through this whole blog, so you may as well resign yourself -- to cases.

For those of you living on Mars who have never heard of it, MURDER, SHE WROTE ran for a mind-boggling 12 seasons, from September 30, 1984, to May 19, 1996, and could have run longer if not for the stupidity of network executives, whose salaries are always in inverse proportion to their cranial capacities. It is by far one of the most successful and iconic TV shows of all time, when its star, Angela Lansbury, died recently at the age of 95, there was an outpouring of public grief which far exceeded that which is normal for a television star of yesteryear. It had a deeply personal quality to it, as one experiences when a distant but beloved relation passes away. There are, of course, many iconic TV shows, but MSW was different from most, because it did not utilize an ensemble cast. Nearly all the eggs were in Lansbury's basket, and she carried them so well that many people born after the show's cancellation are as familiar with it as those who watched it live on television in the 80s and 90s.

The premise of MSW was almost comically simple. Jessica Fletcher, a widowed, recently retired schoolteacher in the small, seaside New England town of Cabot Cove, writes a mystery novel to alleviate her grief and boredom. Her witless nephew Grady (Michael Horton) sends it off to a publisher without her knowledge, and before she knows it, she's a bestselling author. Jessica's lively imagination, keen eye for observation and her deductive faculties, however, make her an ideal amateur sleuth in real life. And since people seem to be murdered whenever Jessica is around, she naturally puts these talents to use by tracking down the killers, usually much to the annoyance of the local police, and the relief of whatever person has been wrongfully accused of the crime. Sometimes those police are the Cabot Cove sheriffs, the bumbling but goodhearted Amos Tupper (Tom Bosley), and later, the tougher and sharper Mort Metzger (Ron Māsak), respectively; but when Jessica travels, as she frequently does to promote or research her next novel, well, there's always a harassed, bumbling local cop on hand who either fights incessantly with her or rather pitifully seeks out her aid. At home, Jessica's best friend, the crusty town doctor Seth Hazlett (William Windom), who refers to her sharply as "woman," is her principal confidant, sounding board, and sparring partner: unlike everyone else in town, he is not in awe of her, a fact she seems to enjoy and appreciate. While on the road, Jessica occasionally had the help of private eyes like Harry McGraw (Jerry Orbach) or Charlie Garrett (Wayne Rogers), or secret agent Michael Hagerty (Len Cariou), all of whom cause her as much trouble as they alleviate. No matter what the circumstances, however, Jessica will get her man -- or her woman, by the final credits.

Running as long as it did, MSW employed a staggering number of actors, many of whom later became famous: Joaquin Phoenix, Bryan Cranston, Linda Hamilton, George Clooney, and Neil Patrick Harris (to name a few) all made guest appearances on the show in the infancy or early stages of their careers. Indeed, a sort of sport can be had in spotting such people, as well as legendary character actors or faded stars from the golden age of cinema, many of whom it is rumored Lansbury insisted on employing, just to keep them working.

The most startling aspect of MSW is the rigidity of its formula. A standard episode goes like this:

1. Jessica arrives in town (unless she's in Cabot Cove, in which case she's already there). Here she meets an old friend or makes a new one. She also meets a rotten creep who everyone overtly or covertly wishes would die, especially said friend. Before the second or third commercial, the creep is found murdered, and the friend becomes the prime suspect.

2. With the help or hinderance of the local constabulary, Jessica investigates the crime in the hopes of clearing her friend's name, discovering that many others had motive, means and opportunity to commit the murder: she interrogates them and makes a general nuisance of herself, sometimes to the point of becoming targeted by the killer herself. The cops stolidly insist on the guilt of her friend and refuse to investigate anyone else. (A common refrain is: "We already have the killer, Mrs. Fletcher!")

3. Via a small epiphany at the last moment, usually prompted by noticing some small detail such as a stain, a torn piece of clothing, an offhand remark, etc., Jessica realizes who the killer is, and either tricks them into giving themselves away within earshot of the police, or confronts them in the standard Agatha Christie drawing-room fashion, identifying the murderer before the others, explaining how the murderer tripped themselves up and extracting the inevitable confession.

There were, of course, variations on the theme: sometimes the friend in need was a relative, or a friend of a friend, an enemy, or even Jessica herself; and sometimes the killer turned out to be someone outside the pack of "usual suspects," such as the investigating police officer, or the very person who pleaded for her assistance at the beginning of the episode. There were a few stories that had overtones of horror or international intrigue, while some were broadly very comedic. All were recognizably part of the same pattern and concluded in almost precisely the same last-second-rescue manner. In some stories, the apprehension of the criminal was more tragic than triumphant, and at least one episode where it is implied that full justice was not done with the outcome; but the criminal was always caught. In this regard, i.e. from a purely structural standpoint, MURDER, SHE WROTE was virtually identical to PERRY MASON.

I grant that small concessions were made to the passage of time. In later seasons, Jessica relocates partially to New York City, ditches her trademark typewriter for a word processor, and seems to embrace more fully the fact she is no longer a widowed former schoomarm scribbling stories at her kitchen table, but a bestselling and internationally famous author. However, none of these things played a significant role in the show or caused any alteration of its formula. Fashion changed. Technology changed. Sets changed. MSW did not.

So where does this leave us? What is the legacy of MURDER, SHE WROTE? Is it still worth watching after all these years, or is it best consigned to the realm of fond memories which can only remain fond if left unexamined? Is there anything we can learn from its success or its ultimate demise?

Let's start with why the show ran so long, why it worked, why it became iconic even in the eyes of those who can't help but mock its rigid formula, its predictability, its ridiculous conceits and frequently cheesy endings.

MURDER, SHE WROTE was comfort food in the sense that the audience knew what was coming from the opening frame. In a sense it was like watching the same play, over and over again, with different actors using a different backdrop. The differences were sufficient to keep it interesting, and the similarities sufficient not to overchallenge the audience. And from its pilot episode very clear on the fact that it possessed a moral compass. As much as the audience enjoyed the loathsome villain getting killed off in the second act, Jessica made it plain in each and every episode that there was never -- never -- a justification for murder. I may be overplaying my hand here, but in this ultra-cynical and morally relitavistic age, a woman with a strong sense of propriety, excellent manners and unwavering moral standards was quite refreshing. Just as her sidekick Dr. Hazlett represented the crusty conservative who dislikes all change, Jessica was a throwback to a time when decency was regarded as strength and not naivete. Another attraction was its lack of attraction:
the fact that the show was so steadfastly, unabashedly unsexy. That is not to say there weren't beautiful women and handsome men on hand, or sub-plots driven by lust, tawdry affairs, sexual obsessions, etc.; but rather that the appeal of the show did not lie with the physical charisma of Angela Lansbury, who even as a very young woman in the 1960s (see THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE) had the appearance of middle age, or with that of the character she portrayed, who was straight-laced, frumpy, formal, and generally uninterested in romance. Like STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION's Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who was haughty and reserved, middle-aged and bald, yet won the hearts of millions of fans around the world, Jessica's appeal lay in her intelligence and strength of character.

This deliberate unsexiness also extended to the spirit of the series itself. It did not rely on the stylstic tricks many shows use to lure viewers: flashy cars, technology, bikini babes, throbbing musical soundtracks. In fact, it periodically made fun of such devices by pitting Jessica against Hollywood executives determined to dumb-down and sex up her mysteries for the silver screen. MSW nearly always retained the air of a "cozy mystery" while providing just enough action to remind the audience there were higher stakes than the mere solution of an intellectual problem.

Why is this a good thing? Well, for starters, it forced the writers to make a serious (if by no means always a successful) attempt to produce stories which were inherently interesting even without the afformentioned bells and whistles. More tangibly, it gave us a protagonist who was relatable in the sense of looking like an actual human being and having no particular appetite for adventure or the so-called finer things in life. She retained the house she had always lived in, never owned a car, and when traveling, her favorite order from room service was "tea and toast," a combination sufficiently boring to remind us of our spinster aunts rather than some female version of James Bond. And this brings me to my last point, no far distance from the previous: Jessica solved mysteries with a combination of moral courage and sheer intellect. She had neither brawn nor sex appeal to fall back on: she was neither enforcer nor seducer. Tom Baker once famously remarked of his character, Doctor Who, that he was a man who thought rather than shot his way out of trouble, and this applies to Jessica as well. Heroes who shoot down their enemies are as common as dirt: rare is the one who brings them down without so much as clenching a fist, much less picking up a gun.

All of this is a way of saying that the principal legacy of MURDER, SHE WROTE is that despite being hopelessly dated in contour and form, it is timeless, because it rests on eternal virtues and an eternal peculiarity: human beings love a mystery and will keep tugging at that knot until it unravels. Watching it now, in the 2020s, I found it the best kind of escapism, one that draws you in and poses a challenge but does not overtax either your brain or your emotions, and, like a theme-park ride, ends in a predictable way. MURDER, SHE WROTE stands in my mind as a testament to the fact that audiences are not as shallow, cruel, or dopamine-addled as modern network executives and writers believe them to be.

As long as it ran, MSW could have run longer, but those same executives decided to shorten the shooting schedule per episode, which overtaxed Angela Lansbury; they also made the quintessential studio suit mistake of switching its time slot, a blunder which killed more successful TV shows than can be counted. So what we can learn from its demise is that oldest of axioms: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

When I walk down Memory Lane, I am usually in a nostalgic mood. Rewatching MURDER, SHE WROTE did not evince much if any nostalgia in me. It simply reminded me that there is a place -- a very large place -- in television, and in film and fiction, for heroes who do not wear capes, who do not shoot guns, who do not win beauty contests, and who wouldn't pay you a penny for caviar and champagne if tea and toast were on the menu.

ART AND ABOMINATION

George Orwell's least understood essay concerns Salvador Dali, the notorious artist-cum-provocateur (or provacateur-cum-artist) of the previous century. Orwell was so passionately devoted to freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of thought that people can be forgiven if they assume he was also against censorship: but anyone who has read "Benefit of Clergy," his scathing attack on Dali's autobiography which appeared in 1944, must come away with a somewhat different conclusion. After giving a precis of Dali's disgusting personal habits and artistic tastes as outlined (and glamorized) in the book, which include such things as necrophilia, coprophagia, and various forms of sadism, Owell writes the following:

It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K. It is also O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.

One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another "King Lear." And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

Orwell stops short of saying the work of Dali must be banned, but if this is not the strongest form of encouragement towards a boycott in every sense of the word -- artistic, commercial, aesthetic, moral -- such a thing does not exist. Orwell is intelligent enough to understand the consequences of banning 'art'; but he is too intelligent to let the word 'art' become a shield and buckler for every degenerate, vile, obscene, disgusting impulse held by mankind. He demands accountability both for the so-called artist and for the audience who pays for it. He is taking a stand for art, but also for decency, and it must be said that he falls farther on the side of decency than art. When he refers to the public hangman, he is no doubt putting himself in the hangman's shoes.

The line between art and obscenity was much on my mind today, due to an accident common to the internet era. While going through an inconcievably tedious list of criminal cases due for trial, I was listening to various documentaries on European directors. One led me to Pier Passolini, the famous (and notorious) Italian poet and film director who is perhaps best remembered for Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a film not many people can watch without vomiting. There seem to be two schools of thought on the movie: the first is that it is a work of great genius and has tremendous artistic merit as an allegory about consumerism, fascism and the pathology -- or anarchy -- of power; the second, in the words of one critic, is that it is "nearly unwatchable, extremely disturbing, and often literally nauseous".

I have no intention of giving a recitation of all the disgusting and depraved things this film offers. Just doing the small amount of research necessary to write this blog quite put me off my lunch -- and I have attended autopsies. Suffice to say that one of the story acts is called "The Circle of Shit," and believe me, this is not metaphorical. My point is that there are many reputable people in the world of cinema and art who regard "Salò" as a work of authentic genius, possessing real literary merit, rather than an obscenity which ought to be burned by the public hangman. Some say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but this begs the question: are all beholders sane? Are all aesthetic viewpoints equally valid? Is there no objective truth in art, no minimal standard of decency which must be adhered to? Does merely calling oneself an artist, or even sincerely believing that one is contributing something of actual artistic merit to the community at large no matter how vile it may appear on the surface, grant one the "benefit of clergy" Orwell was referring to?

Orwell certainly understood the "slippery slope" of civics: the restriction of one freedom inevitably leads to the restrictions of others. At the same time, he grasped that there are moral absolutes which transcend the artist's claim of immunity, and was unafraid to point out this fact. As it happens, the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. We believe in freedom of speech, but we cannot yell "fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Nor can we share military secrets in time of war. Nor can we incite people to riot, or encourage the violent overthrow of our government, or even slander or libel a fellow human being. Such restrictions on speech exist for the greater good of humanity, but they also exist to draw a deep line in the sand, and tell the forces of moral anarchy, "This far and no father." They exist as a boundary line between the ordinary, more or less "decent" person, and those who seek to exploit the law to further their own twisted aims. You may recall a previous blog of mine in which I detailed how Harvey Weinstein made a definite attempt to normalize his own perversions in the movie "The Burning." Subsequent events have only reinforced my belief that many others are doing precisely the same thing through various artistic mediums. Instead of trying to conform to societal norms, they are doing their damndest to change what is normal: instead of imposing discipline on their own bestial natures, they are trying mightily to convince us there is nothing wrong with them.

In my own artistic works, if I may be permitted to call them artistic, you will undoubtedly encounter some very disturbing things, but I fancy that anyone who reads my fiction would quickly grasp that there is an underlying morality, however deeply it is buried within the story. Even if this is not perceptible to you (in which case I have probably failed in my duty as a writer), it is probably possible to divine what my motives were when I set pen to paper. And it is the question of motive rather than execution that this whole tricky problem uneasily rests. For there are three basic motives to the self-described artist:

1. To entertain.
2. To provoke.
3. To destroy.


When I write a short story, or a novella, or a novel, or any other damned thing, my first motive is always to entertain, by which I mean not necessarily offering mere entertainment, but also enlightenment and education, if the story lends itself to that sort of thing and if I am as a writer am capable of delivering it. I may very well fail in my effort, but entertainment is at any rate is my main objective. If I lower myself to be merely provocative, it is usually as a stylistic trick, to lure the audience back toward my central goal of entertainment -- of holding their interest, and perhaps providing food for thought. I cannot think of anything I've ever written which was purely provocative in the Howard Stern sense of the word, i.e. outrageous for the sake of garnering attention, without the possession of any other motive. The brutal fact is that it is usually one without talent -- but as in the case of Dali, sometimes with considerable talent but no moral compass -- who uses provocation, or shock, as a form of advertising pure and simple. Provocation can have deeper merit if it is employed to spark debate, but the line between provocateur and carnival barker is very fine indeed, and great men have stumbled over it without realizing they had done so, which is sufficient reason in my mind for treating this approach with great caution.

There is however a lower form of artistry than this, one in which quotes around "artistry" must be used as a form of segregation, lest the rest of us be tainted with his stench: the "artist" whose art is a Trojan Horse, created for the express purpose of normalizing his perversions and prejudices. Weinstein tried to do this with "The Burning," albeit in a rather subtle way, but in recent years the subtley of this approach has shed its own skin and become much more blatant. The existence of the internet has allowed a veritable parade of perverts and freaks to seek out others like themselves, form "communities," and begin the process of normalizing themselves in the public eye, and there is no better method for achieving this than through art -- the most readily consumable form of art being television and film.

At this point I should pause to remind the reader that I am politically a centrist with some libertarian leanings. I love freedom and I hate bullying, cant, and cruelty. I try very hard to tolerate those with different opinions or lifestyles even when those opinions or lifestyles leave me something worse than cold, since I believe any baggage I have in those directions is mine to carry. But I refuse to equate tolerance and non-aggression with moral blindness. I refuse to accept moral relativism. I refuse to be lumped in with the degenerate freaks who call themselves artists simply because it's a convenient refuge for their perversions. Art is not synonymous with irresponsibility. It is not a "get out of jail free" card. The artist has no benefit of clergy: he is free to do as he chooses but not free from the consequences of his choices, which includes boycott, and in the most extreme circumstances, and following the necessary legal procedures to determine same, censorship, as the "art" of extreme pornographic filmmakers like Rob Zaccari and Paul Little was censored. I will not hesitate to stand up and shout at poseurs and frauds who masquerade as artists while pushing nefarious ideologies or personal agendas on the sly. And I will hold myself accountable to these standards, and expect others to hold me to them as well. I should rather that, than to be tarred with the same filthy brush.

In the present age, when a systematic effort is being made to destroy age-old notions of morality, it is reasonable to cast a suspicious eye on those who seek to provoke and disgust only to "scuttle like rats" behind the First Amendment, when it is so obvious where their ultimate motive lies. By their motives and not by their works you shall know them.